Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863

Abstract

Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 16131836. By Graham Russell Hodges. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 413. Illustrations, maps, tables. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $18.95.) Graham Russell Hodges has taken on the commendable and consuming task of writing the history of black New York from its colonial beginnings in 1613 through the tumultuous early years of the Civil War. Root & Branch examines the cultural, social, and political development of black men and women in New York and east New Jersey, chronicling the successes and failures in their long struggle for freedom. Through church records, tax lists, wills, slave trade statistics, diaries, and other sources, Hodges has contributed tremendously not only to the historiography of African-American life, but also to the narratives of colonial, early American, and antebellum history. In his introduction, Hodges acknowledges that his project builds upon the work of other historians such as Shane White, Edgar McManus, and Roi Ottley. His construction of black New York begins with the arrival of the first black in New Netherland in June 1613 and ends with the Draft Riots of 1863. The first two chapters of his work explore the development of the legal codification of slavery in New York as well as the evolution of a distinct slave culture in both the infant city and the rural countryside. Just as Virginia's slave laws evolved over the first few decades of the seventeenth century, slavery in New York took form in a similar fashion. As the legal status of slavery in the colony was unclear, African men and women existed in an ambivalent environment. These men and women were by no means free. However, the future of their enslavement was ambiguous, as Holland did not recognize slavery at home and as chattel bondage was still an emerging concept. According to Hodges and many other historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, race did not determine the free or enslaved status of a man or woman in colonial New York. As the West India Company utilized both white and black servants, Hodges's argument concerning the fluidity of race relations in seventeenth-century New York is fairly convincing. However, by the 1640s the West India Company began the legacy of black slavery as a handful of black men along with their wives were given their freedom with weighty stipulations. Annual fees in the form of maize, wheat, peas, beans, and hogs were to be paid by the Africans to the government in return for their freedom. However, the final stipulation of freedom rested upon the condition that their existing children were to serve as slaves. Hodges points to this moment as a turning point in black slavery for New Amsterdam and North America, for Dutch officials ruled that slavery would descend through the mother, a practice that became standard in America (13). Perhaps the most impressive section of Hodges's work focuses upon the development of slavery and slave culture during the eighteenth century through the American Revolution. Hodges spends a great deal of time examining what he labels as the Thirty Year Rebellion, an intensified period of slave resistance following the passage of strict slave codes in New Jersey and New York. …